The template pattern
The template pattern is useful for removing duplicate code; it's an implementation to support the Don't Repeat Yourself principle we discussed in Chapter 5, When to Use Object-oriented Programming. It is designed for situations where we have several different tasks to accomplish that have some, but not all, steps in common. The common steps are implemented in a base class, and the distinct steps are overridden in subclasses to provide custom behavior. In some ways, it's like a generalized strategy pattern, except similar sections of the algorithms are shared using a base class. Here it is in the UML format:
A template example
Let's create a car sales reporter as an example. We can store records of sales in an SQLite database table. SQLite is a simple file-based database engine that allows us to store records using SQL syntax. Python 3 includes SQLite in its standard library, so there are no extra modules required.
We have two common tasks we need to perform:
Select all sales...
